This title presents original discussions on the public role of history and historians from a pantheon of notable experts. ""Recent Themes on Historians and the Public"" represents some of the best recent writing on the public role of historians. These articles and interviews from ""Historically Speaking"" examine the relationship between historians and their audiences. Award-winning 'popular historian' Adam Hochschild begins by discussing the relationship between popular and academic history. An all-star cast of historians and editors offer their responses, forming a fascinating extended conversation. This forum addresses questions such as what the public role of the historian should be and whether practicing history requires a license. In addition the book contains a candid exchange about the state of the history profession at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Designed to engage both students and general readers, ""Recent Themes on Historians and the Public"" illuminates the controversy over the role of historians in the public sphere. The contributors are Eric Arnesen, H. W. Brands, John Demos, Joseph J. Ellis, John Ferling, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Thomas Fleming, James Goodman, Adam Hochschild, Bruce Kuklick, John Lukacs, Joyce Lee Malcolm, Louis P. Masur, Wilfred M. McClay, Greg Neale, Maureen Ogle, William Palmer, Leo P. Ribuffo, Joyce Seltzer, Daniel Snowman, Barry Strauss, Marc Trachtenberg, Derek Wilson, John Wilson, and Jay Winik.

This volume presents the thinking and the activities of some of the most serious and successful practitioners of world history. The fifteen contributors are experience historians from ten countries dispersed across five continents. Their essays confirm the experience of an emerging worldwide discourse on the past of our planet, but they also reveal the distinctive conditions and local innovations of global historians in different parts of the world. They give particularly attention to the emergence of formal institutions for study of world history. University departments, research institutes, international conferences, and the leaders of museums are now demonstrably involved in full-scale study of the human past at a global level. Work in these institutions will surely reveal new patterns, dispel some old beliefs, provoke debates, and demonstrate the need for still more research.The book begins with the official report of the World History Research Agenda Symposium. This unusual conference (held in Nov 2006 in Boston) launched the formal discussion of priorities in world-historical research. In seven further chapters, the authors describe university level study of world history at undergraduate and especially graduate levels, conveying some remarkable advances in conceptualization of the global past and explaining the curricula they have implemented for directing students in world historical research. The final four chapters turn to the other institutions that support the development of advanced study in world history: journals, museums, and research institutes. Here the authors document the organizational innovations that have brought discussion of world-historical issues to wider audiences.This is the second volume in a series on research in world history, produced by the World History Network Inc. The previous volume, ""World History: Global and Local Interactions"" displayed the accomplishments of PhD students and graduates whose research focuses on topics in world history.

Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny).

In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj Zizek. In a related vein, he discusses Martin Heidegger's evocative, if not enchanting, understanding of "The Origin of the Work of Art." LaCapra subjects to critical scrutiny the sometimes internally divided way in which violence has been valorized in sacrificial, regenerative, or redemptive terms by a series of important modern intellectuals on both the far right and the far left, including Georges Sorel, the early Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, and Ernst Junger.

Violence and victimization are prominent in the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra questions prevalent anthropocentrism (evident even in theorists of the "posthuman") and the long-standing quest for a decisive criterion separating or dividing the human from the animal. LaCapra regards this attempt to fix the difference as misguided and potentially dangerous because it renders insufficiently problematic the manner in which humans treat other animals and interact with the environment.

In raising the issue of desirable transformations in modernity, History and Its Limits examines the legitimacy of normative limits necessary for life in common and explores the disconcerting role of transgressive initiatives beyond limits (including limits blocking the recognition that humans are themselves animals)."

Subtitled "Hungarian noble residences and their social context from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth century: an outline for methodology." This work aims to set up a research agenda to show how archaeology can contribute to an interdisciplinary study of society in the later Middle Ages, in this case in terms of a survey of the possibilities of using archaeology to study Hungarian nobility from the point of view of their living conditions and the functions of their residences. The author, drawn to this theme through an excavation in Pomaz (west of Budapest) in 1995, investigates the co-existence of various settlement types from the point of view of manorial buildings.

This volume is in honour of distinguished historian Professor V N Datta. The essays contributed by some of the most eminent historians which cut across boundaries of time and space highlight the diversified and multidimensional nature of historical studies, encompassing some of the most fascinating themes in history from ancient to contemporary times. "The book covers broad themes like land relations; regional identity; gender relations; composite culture; internal migration; colonial notions of power; environment; science; nationalist discourse; ethnicity and politics of Dalit identity. In addition, two essays conceptualising and illuminating modernity in Europe and Asian identity form part of this volume. The collection makes an important contribution to the field of social, political and cultural history. Contributors to this volume are: K M Shrimali; Bhairabi P Sahu; Indu Banga; J S Grewal; Aniruddha Ray; Shireen Moosvi; Sabyasachi Bhattacharya; Sudhir Chandra; Satpal Sangwan; Deepak Kumar; Radica Mahase; Suranjan Das; Harish K. Puri; Barun De; Irfan Habib; Kesavan Veluthat; K N Panikkar; Amrik Singh; K L Tuteja and Sunita Pathania.

The middle ages, the age of Charlemagne, Chaucer and Dante, had an indelible effect on European culture. "In Search of the Holy Grail" is a survey of the influence of the middle ages, and of medieval attitudes and values, on later periods and on the modern world. Many artistic, political and literary movements have drawn inspiration and sought their roots in the thousand years between 500 and 1500 AD. Medieval Christianity, and its rich legacy, has been the essential background to European culture as a whole. Gothic architecture and chivalry were two keys to Romanticism, while nationalists, including the Nazis, looked back to the middle ages to find emerging signs of national character. In literature few myths have been as durable or popular as those of King Arthur, stretching from the Dark Ages to Hollywood. "In Search of the Holy Grail" is a vivid account of how later ages learnt about and interpreted the middle ages. Veronica Ortenberg shows how medieval ideas and legacies surround us still in the twenty-first century.

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historical artifacts themselves. Texas' pasts are examined in this groundbreaking volume, featuring chapters by a wide range of scholars. Current historians' views of Texas in the nineteenth century and especially the significance of the Alamo as a site of memory in architecture, art, and film across the years comprise a major element of this volume. Other nineteenth-century historical events are also examined through their memorializations in the twentieth century: the construction of Civil War monuments by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public and private Juneteenth celebrations, and the Tejano memorial on the Capitol grounds commemorating the history of Mexicans in Texas. Twentieth-century chapters include collective memories and meaning attached to the Ku Klux Klan, the significance of the civil rights movement in the eyes of different generations of Texans, and the lasting (or fading) Texan memories of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The volume editors offer these studies as a model of how Texas historians can begin to incorporate memory into their work, as historians of other regions have done. In the process, they offer a more nuanced and even a more applied version of Texas history than many of us learned in school. GREGG CANTRELL is the Erma and Ralph Lowe Professor of History at Texas Christian University and the author of Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas. ELIZABETH HAYES TURNER, an associate professor at the University of North Texas, is the author of Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920.

In Hiding from History, Meili Steele challenges an assumption at the heart of current debates in political, literary, historical, and cultural theory: that it is impossible to reason through history. Steele believes that two influential schools of contemporary thought "hide from history": liberal philosophies of public reason as espoused by such figures as Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, and John Rawls and structuralism/poststructuralism as practiced by Judith Butler, Hayden White, and Michel Foucault. For Steele, public reasoning cannot be easily divorced from either the historical imagination in general or the specific legacies that shape, and often haunt, political communities.Steele introduces the concept of public imagination concepts, images, stories, symbols, and practices of a culture to show how the imaginative social space that citizens inhabit can be a place for political discourse and debate. Steele engages with a wide range of thinkers and their works, as well as historical events: debates over the display of the Confederate flag in public places; Ralph Ellison's exchange with Hannah Arendt over school desegregation in Little Rock; the controversy surrounding Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners; and arguments about the concept of a "clash of civilizations" as expressed by Samuel Huntington, Ashis Nandy, Edward Said, and Amartya Sen. Championing history and literature's capacity to articulate the politics of public imagination, Hiding from History boldly outlines new territory for literary and political theory."

The first book to examine in detail Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History Benjamin's collection of fragments, Theses on the Philosophy of History, play a determining role in how Benjamin's thought is understood, as well as in the debate about the interplay between politics, history and time. Walter Benjamin and History is the first volume to give access to the themes and problems raised by the Theses, providing valuable exegetical and historical work on the text. The essays collected here are all the work of noted Benjamin scholars, and pursue the themes central to the Theses.

At the End of an Age isa deeply informed and rewarding reflection on the nature of historical and scientific knowledge. Of extraordinary philosophical, religious, and historical scope, it is the product of a great historian's lifetime of thought on the subject of his discipline and the human condition. While running counter to most of the accepted ideas and doctrines of our time, it offers a compelling framework for understanding history, science, and man's capacity for self-knowledge. In this work, John Lukacs describes how we in the Western world have now been living through the ending of an entire historical age that began in Western Europe about five hundred years ago. Unlike people during the ending of the Middle Ages or the Roman empire, we can know where we are. But how and what is it that we know? In John Lukacs's view, there is no science apart from scientists, and all of "Science," including our view of the universe, is a human creation, imagined and defined by fallible human beings in a historical continuum. This radical and reactionary assertion-in its way a summa ofthe author's thinking, expressed here and there in many of his previous twenty-odd books-leads to his fundamental assertion that, contrary to all existing cosmological doctrines and theories, it is this earth which is the very center of the universe-the only universe we know and can know.

"A great resource for students and scholars. Chock-full of up-to-date, reliable information, this book has practically everything you need to know about contemporary Colombia all in one package." --Herbert Braun, author of Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia The South American nation of Colombia has seen more than forty years of unrest, conflict, and civil war. It is a country in which social violence and warfare are intricately intertwined. Colombia is also notorious for its drug trade, being one of the leading producers of cocaine in the world, and for its central role as a staging ground for the U.S. "war on drugs." Since 9/11 the Bush administration has sought to draw political links between the Colombian drug trade, guerrilla organizations, and terrorism. Inside Colombia offers a valuable introduction and quick reference guide to this complex nation. With chapters devoted to history, human rights issues, the economy, drugs, the controversial antidrug intervention known as Plan Colombia, and relations with the United States, the book offers an easily accessible and comprehensive overview. Readers will learn about the major players in the conflicts, significant political figures, how Colombia's economy has fared in the twentieth century, how the country's geography influences its politics and economy, and how U.S. intervention shapes Colombia's political scene. Grace Livingstone is a journalist who regularly contributes to a range of publications on Latin American current affairs and has reported for the BBC World Service. She is currently based in Venezuela where she is a correspondent for The Guardian. Jenny Pearce is the coauthor of Civil Society and Development: A Critical Exploration.

History in Transit comprises Dominick LaCapra's explorations of relationships he believes have been insufficiently theorized: between experience and identity, between history and various theories of subjectivity, between extreme events and their representation, between institutional structures and the kinds of knowledge produced within them. Taken together, these discussions form a dialogical encounter, positing the links among epistemological questions, historicist ones, and issues pertaining to disciplinary and institutional politics.

Reacting against the antitheoretical bias of some prominent historians, LaCapra presents an alternative model of historiographical practice one in which emphases on plurality and hybridity are combined with the concept of historical experience. For LaCapra experience emerges as a category both theoretically determined and anchored in the facticity of the everyday. LaCapra tests the assumptions and implications of the way one approaches the past by looking to psychoanalysis to render more self-aware the relationship between the historian and his or her material. He offers criticisms of assumptions held by practicing historians and theorists, placing the study of history at the center of a larger argument about the role of the contemporary university.

Contesting both corporatization and claims that the university is in ruins, LaCapra writes, "It is paradoxical that the demand to make the university conform to an ever-increasing extent to a market or business model seems oblivious to the fact that the American university has probably been the most successful of its type in the world, that students from other countries disproportionately desire to study in it.""

With the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment perceived Islam as the new enemy. The 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Africa, and the events of 9/11 - all culminated in substantiating this perception.

The War on Terrorism has raised several complicated issues surrounding the relationship between the United States and Islam. With America's increasing involvement in the Middle East, it is imperative for Muslims to understand America; but at the same time, Americans must learn to understand Islam. The progress of civilization hangs on the ability for cooperation and understanding between these cultures.

Although this challenge of removing the "clash" between these two cultures is indeed pressing, it is not new. Negative images of Islam have persisted in the United States throughout its history.

This volume of "The Annals" reflects on how damaging images of Islam have endured in the United States and how Americans' perceptions and misconceptions about Islam is inexorably linked to United States' policy in the Middle East.

The articles in this special issue will spark intriguing debate and discussion as well as shed light on the complex concerns engulfing Americans' ideas about Islam and Muslim states and how this relationship influences global politics.

With the end of the Cold War, the American political establishment perceived Islam as the new enemy. The 1993 explosion at the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Africa, and the events of 9/11 - all culminated in substantiating this perception.

The War on Terrorism has raised several complicated issues surrounding the relationship between the United States and Islam. With America's increasing involvement in the Middle East, it is imperative for Muslims to understand America; but at the same time, Americans must learn to understand Islam. The progress of civilization hangs on the ability for cooperation and understanding between these cultures.

Although this challenge of removing the "clash" between these two cultures is indeed pressing, it is not new. Negative images of Islam have persisted in the United States throughout its history.

This volume of "The Annals" reflects on how damaging images of Islam have endured in the United States and how Americans' perceptions and misconceptions about Islam is inexorably linked to United States' policy in the Middle East.

The articles in this special issue will spark intriguing debate and discussion as well as shed light on the complex concerns engulfing Americans' ideas about Islam and Muslim states and how this relationship influences global politics.

Anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead presents a collection of recent fieldwork and the latest theoretical perspectives that illuminate how a range of Native communities in the Amazon River basin, and those they encounter, use the past to make sense of their world and themselves. In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly aware of the role the past plays in the construction of culture and identity. Not only can the past be represented and codified overtly in various ways and media as a "history," it also operates more fundamentally and pervasively in cultures as a mode of consciousness or way of thinking about the world, a "historicity." In addition to examining the particular foundations and significance of history and historicity in such communities as the Guaja, Wapishana, Dekuana, and Patamuna, the contributors to this volume consider more broadly how different natural and cultural features can help shape historical consciousness: landscape and territory; rituals such as feasting; genealogy and kinship; and even the practice of archaeology. Also of interest are activist uses of historicity to promote and legitimize the cultural integrity and political agendas of Native communities, especially in contact situations past and present where multiple and often competing forms of history and historicity play important political roles in articulating relations between colonizers and the colonized. As this volume makes clear, understanding the powerful cultural role of the past helps scholars better appreciate the inherent dynamic quality of all cultures and recognize a rich resource of agency that can be used both to comprehend and to transform the present

As in the present, past peoples commemorated, constructed, and manipulated their past for their own social and political ends. Archaeologists can use a variety of evidence to study social memory and to recover past ideas about what the more distant past was like. "Archaeologies of Memory" is a groundbreaking text that presents a coherent framework for the study of memory in past societies.

This unique collection of new essays brings together contributions from both anthropological and classical archaeologists. Essays, drawn from a variety of cultures and time periods, engage a number of common themes, such as issues of authority and identity, and the role memory plays in their creation and transformation. "Archaeologies of Memory" is an accessible investigation into the central issues in the study of memory and provides an engaging introduction to this controversial subject.

Until the 1960s and the advent of African independence, African history was rarely concerned with African lives. Africans were not considered fitting subjects or authoritative sources for historical research and their voices and experiences were largely absent from the continent's history. Efforts to restore African expression to African history have characterized much of postcolonial historical research and writing, but questions about the use of oral sources in the quest for truth continue to plague interpreters and interpretations of the African past. This analysis reveals African historians involved with and committed to developing unique methodologies for dealing with history on their own terms. African historians from North America, Europe and Africa confront questions such as the relationship between a community's oral and written history, the role of personal histories, the effects of racism and colonialism, the suppression of facts, and how historians should mediate and interpret research data.; Focusing on all areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, the essays brought together here seek to reflect the extraordinary range of engagement that represents the state-of-the-art of African h

Geillustreerde verslae van mense wat die tweede Vryheidsoorlog deurleef het. Dit gee 'n goeie beeld van wat die mense moes deurmaak en wat in die kampe aangegaan het. 'n Audio-band is ingesluit by die prys van die boekie.

'This book caused quite a stir when it appeared in 1991 and has now attained Routledge Classics status ... Jenkins packs a lot into a short space and his explanations of "history theory" are impressively concise.' - The Guardian

'A startlingly clear and thought-provoking introduction to current central debates in history and historiography. It is accessible to history students, students in subjects that draw on historical past and to the general reader. Already, a classic text book.' - Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London

'Far and away the best introduction to the state of the question currently available.' - Hayden White, University of California at Santa Cruz

From Reliable Sources is a lively introduction to historical methodology, an overview of the techniques historians must master in order to reconstruct the past. Its focus on the basics of source criticism, rather than on how to find references or on the process of writing, makes it an invaluable guide for all students of history and for anyone who must extract meaning from written and unwritten sources.

Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier explore the methods employed by historians to establish the reliability of materials; how they choose, authenticate, decode, compare, and, finally, interpret those sources. Illustrating their discussion with examples from the distant past as well as more contemporary events, they pay particular attention to recent information media, such as television, film, and videotape.

The authors do not subscribe to the positivist belief that the historian can attain objective and total knowledge of the past. Instead, they argue that each generation of historians develops its own perspective, and that our understanding of the past is constantly reshaped by the historian and the world he or she inhabits.

A substantially revised and updated edition of Prevenier's Uit goede bron, originally published in Belgium and now in its seventh edition, From Reliable Sources also provides a survey of western historiography and an extensive research bibliography.

A new essay focusing on the contribution of Chinua Achebe's writing to Africa's literary and political life, from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, and the present state of Africa. The essay is interdisciplinary drawing on history, politics and economics, conflict theory and literary criticism. It is wide in scope, discussing a breadth of topics such as imbalances in trade relations between Africa and the rest; the inefficacy and hypocrisy of Western aid in light of debt and the arms supply from the West; genocide and HIV; and the implications of current US uni-polar dominance for Africa. In the context of his study Ekwe-Ekwe celebrates what he argues are the seminal dimensions of Achebe's writings: which affirm an African historicity; point to the futility of an unreconstructed post-colonial state in leading Africa's reconstruction; and advocate an African renaissance based on Africa's critical engagement with its rich cultural heritage. The author is a Professor of history and politics and Director of the centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, Dakar.

This important book charts the development of philosophical thinking about history over the past 250 years, combining extracts from key texts with new explanatory and critical discussion. The book is designed to make the work of thinkers such as Hume, Herder, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault accessible to students with no prior knowledge of Western philosophy.
An introductory section is followed by nine further chapters exploring contrasting schools of thought. The volume reveals the origins of contemporary trends in the discipline and relates wider philosophical reflections to the study of history itself. It also points to connections between philosophy of history and literary and cultural theory which have developed in recent decades.

How do ancient historians pursue their craft? From the evidence of coins, pottery shards, remains of buildings, works of art, and, above all, literary texts -- all of which have survived more or less accidentally from antiquity -- they fashion works of history. But how exactly do they go about reconstructing and representing the past? How should history be written?

These and related questions are the subject of Neville Morley's engaging introduction to the theory and philosophy of history. Intended for students and teachers not only of ancient history but of historiography, the philosophy of history, and classics, his book addresses the implications of debates over methodological and theoretical issues for the practice of ancient history.

At the present time, Morley says, students of ancient history are left to come to their own understanding of the field through a process of trial and error. In his view, too many professors regard "questions of theory and methodology ... as pointless distractions from the business of actually doing history. Worse, (these questions) may even be perceived as a threat to the subject." Asserting that more attention must be given to fundamental matters, Morley considers such topics as the nature of historical narrative, style in historical writing, the use and abuse of sources, and the reasons for studying history.

Herodotus, widely known as the father of history, was also described by Aristotle as a mythologos, or "tale-teller." In this stylish and insightful book, intended for both general readers and students, James Romm argues that the author of the Histories was both a historian-in the original sense of "one who inquires"-and a master storyteller. Although most ancient historians wrote only about events they themselves had lived through, Herodotus explored an era well before his own time-from the rise of the Persian Empire to the Persian invasions of Greece in 490 and 480 B.C., the heroic fight of the Greeks against the invaders, and the final Greek victory. Working without the aid of written sources, Herodotus traveled widely and wove into his chronology descriptions of people and countries he visited and anecdotes that shed light on their lives and customs. Romm discusses the historical background of Herodotus`s life and work, his moralistic approach to history, his insatiable fascination with people and places, his literary powers, and the question of the historical "truth" behind the stories he relates. He gives general readers a fresh appreciation of the Histories as a work encompassing fiction and nonfiction, myth and history, and poetry and prose. Herodotus becomes not simply a source of historical data but a masterful and artistic author who created a radically new literary genre. Hermes Books John Herington, Founding Editor

What good is history to cultural studies? Meaghan Morris looks at struggles over "history" in social settings created by capitalism: in tourist landscapes and in television time. The materials of her analysis are motels, shopping malls, beaches, and local politics. She focuses on history and cultural heritage as issues of controversy for white working-class and poor suburban communities, as well as for urban cultural elites.